Snow pro tips for Kiwis

A few things everybody from my part of the world knows, but you Kiwis may not:

• The slush on your driveway and sidewalk will freeze tonight into a slippery mess that will not melt until mid-day if you did not shovel it.
• If you postpone shoveling until the snow stops, that just makes the job harder later.
• Fresh snow falling on hard-frozen slushy muck makes things even worse.
• Cat litter and a shovel in the back of the car can be really helpful. Similarly, cat litter under tyres on an icy driveway also helps. A bucket of beach sand is just as good.
• If you're in a rear wheel drive, adding throttle on loss of traction rarely helps. And spinning your tyres is far worse than rocking back and forth.

One thing that I didn't see today that I ought to have: rosy-faced kids coming to the door offering to shovel the sidewalk and driveway for $20. I'd have paid it.

Despite 27.5% youth unemployment AND the schools closed for snow, no kids came round looking to work. And so I had to do it myself.

 I'll hazard a guess that this was due to lack of anticipated demand. If most Kiwis reckon that snow's not worth worrying about because it'll just melt, kids might well expect no demand, and so Say's Law holds: lack of demand means no supply is brought forth. When the 3-year old and I took a walk around the block, I counted no more than 4 driveways that had been shoveled; only two had also bothered to shovel the sidewalk.

I'll put that difference partially to differences in liability law. In Pittsburgh, for example, if you don't clear the sidewalk in reasonable time, you're liable for injuries incurred by pedestrians. Things vary across states, and even county to county. I wonder if anybody's done anything interesting playing around with differences in sidewalk liability regimes. Maybe you could use it as an instrument for entrepreneurship: kids in high liability regimes may expect to have clients and so will find returns to early entrepreneurship, setting them on the path to future greatness. But only in places where snow is infrequent enough that homeowners don't just contract with Mr. Plow.

Once Ira is 8 years old, if we're still here and if there's snow again, I'll send him out to test whether the problem is on the supply or the demand side....